Here's another YouTube video I found by accident; after watching the video on Canut's latest blog post (Señor Ayudame), this was one of the selection of videos in small squares that appears at the end. Per the poster, Yoe14756, this is a rare live recording from 1994. Great performance, great sound quality, and great slide show! A lot of photos, some of which I’ve never seen before. WONDERFUL photo of Nicolas at 2:14.

I'm happy to have discovered the Forum! By way of an introduction, I'm a former world language (French/Spanish) resource teacher for special ed students who were having trouble passing their language requirement for graduation. I enjoy all kinds of music, but grew up with classic rock (the Moody Blues, who inspired me to teach myself to play guitar). Somehow, between my love for guitar and my love for world languages, I discovered the Gipsy Kings and finally -- after years of thinking I could never do it -- with some encouragement I found in re-reading Canut's blog, I'm teaching myself to play rumba flamenca. It's an ongoing challenge. I've managed to get some of the strums down, but I get lost when I try to get up that speed. No "Aouiii, aouiii! Olé! Eso es!" for me yet, but I'm working on it!

(By the way, the video "La Chiquita Son Bonita" is also called "Ciento" ... but "Ciento" should be "Siento" because ciento means "percent" and siento means "I feel; I sense; I hear." "La Chiquita Son Bonita" should be "Las Chiquitas Son Bonitas" because son is plural, meaning "are." And the word at the end of the song, which I've seen as "wawaco" in online lyrics, is guaguancó, a Cuban rumba rhythm.)

Thanks for introducing yourself! It is wonderful to be multi-lingual. I wish I'd kept up the language studies I had in school. I'm sure that with steady practice you'll make good progress with rumba flamenca.

I know that according to standard Spanish grammar, "La Chiquita son Bonita" should be "Las Chiquitas son Bonitas," but I remember Patchai singing the song with the lyrics "La chiquita son bonita." Maybe it's a regional dialect, with the plural implied because of the word "son."

I think we are all right -- you, me and Patchaï! And this is likely why there are so many misheard, misunderstood and mistranslated (or untranslated) lyrics online for the Gipsy Kings songs.

In the Americas, we usually hear the consonants s, t and d being pronounced pretty similarly in Spanish (Español) to the way we pronounce them in English. But in European Spanish (Castellano or, as the Gipsy Kings speak, Catalán) the consonants s and z sound more like th; and some Spanish speakers don't always pronounce s at all. You can hear both Nicolas and Canut pronounce más (in "Djobi Djoba") as ma. Many also have the habit of not always pronouncing d; for example, the word aprendido is pronounced correctly just as it is spelled, but many will say it as aprendio.

The same is also true of the ll combination. In the Americas it comes across either as a y or as a kind of rapidly flicked li; for example, we hear the word llores either as yores or liores. But in the song "Amigo," we hear Canut pronounce it more like joreth.

Thanks for all the info on Spanish! It's only natural that there would be many differences among countries and regions. I read someone on the internet once who said that some of the Gipsy Kings' lyrics weren't "real Spanish." That is just ignorant and insulting, what they really mean is, the lyrics aren't standard or textbook Spanish. I'm aware of some of the differences, like the major differences between the pronunciations in Spain and Latin America. My first Spanish class ever was in 9th grade, and the teacher insisted that we use the Castilian Spanish pronunciation every time we spoke Spanish, all year long! For us, living in the Los Angeles area, with such a big population of people from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, that didn't make too much sense, but he felt we should learn the language in its original classic style. All the other Spanish teachers at my high school taught the Latin American pronunciation!